Credit card - confirmation required?

[Ken-ES]

[DavidW]

I just wanted to commend mrchips' approach of making contact with the company using contact information he found from his own sources to validate the request. Too often, fraud is committed through people's naivete - especially using links in what turn out to be fraudulent emails that look as if they're taking you to the genuine site, but in fact take you somewhere completely different. That's a standard trick of the phishers.


If in doubt, ask; you can always contact your card issuer for advice if you're unsure of what to do.



David

[mavis]

I have come across this but hte company in question computer universe were happy for me to cover the numbers of the card and the number on the back.
As they already have all the details I see no problem with this.

[mrchips]

Gingernut777 has suggested to me by PM that although I sent nothing on the fax that the compay did not already know. ... by sending a fax of my details, 'someone' and obviously not with the consent of the company in question, now have something that they could fax off to someone else to use as proof of address and ownership etc.

If I had been really clever, (and I can be pretty clever in hindsight) I would have written on the fax that the details were for use of ExPansys only relating to transaction such and such.

However, in future I would probably refuse to send such details ... gingernut777 has a very good point.

regards
_________________
TomTom Start 25 M UK & ROI

[Dave]

I wouldn't worry, retailers have your credit card details anyway, so if they really wanted to be nasty they could hand these over to criminals to start charging your card with lots of goodies that you don't buy, they have all the information really that they need, but they won't do that because their not part of the criminal fraternity. I suspect your fax will have been shredded or binned by now.

Retailers don't keep that much paperwork, you'll find that because everything is electronic, it's a lot easier to change a flag on the system to say yes he has sent confirmation / authorisation.

[gingernut777]

[trafcam]

From a retailers point of view, there is very little that you can do to protect yourself against things like chargebacks. The document that we receive if someone does a chargeback on us states that there's no point us disputing the charge unless we have a signed card authorisation slip to present as evidence - something that any mailorder company will not have. There isn't even any way we can find out what reason the cardholder gave for requesting the chargeback, so that we can dispute the facts of the case.

I read somewhere that although it's always wise to be careful with your credit card details when buying on-line, there is far more fraud goes on in resort restaurants and bars where the unscrupulous scan the card contents and make a few charges on it before you get home to stop them. A recent edition of 'Airport' showed a pair of illegal immigrants who had stacks of credit card blanks and a list of information scanned off cards using a low-cost card reader. Apparently there's enough there to make a charge, though perhaps not with the new Chip and Pin.

[Dave]

Yeah it seems silly really that credit card companies and merchant banks will not honor and protect the retailer, they put all the faith in the consumer who owns the card.

The amount of times I've heard of people requesting a charge back, just because they don't like a product (and keeping the product) which is just blatant fraud.

There's been lots of cases in the media where they say that your card is more at risk putting it behind a bar or in a restaurant than online. Personally I'd agree with them. The only time there is a higher risk is that if a company stores your credit card details (e.g. Amazon) for future processing and their systems do get hacked, then you are at a higher risk there, but still by far the most fraud occurs via people taking an imprint of the card, or writing down the numbers, name and CVN which literally takes seconds.

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